Chris Morris played a strange game in his debut feature Four Lions, mixing jihadist zeal with goofy physical comedy. In the end it worked but had to do a lot of work to form itself. Here, the veteran satirist allows the broader comedy to reach a surprising refinement as the stakes rise and the darker subplots support it. This film is almost never shy in going for a laugh (and they're good laughs) but intricate plot allows us to rest when it demands our ethical attention. So, while some scenes might recall the MASH episodes with Colonel Flagg and his unsolvable paradoxes these are needed for later when the contradictions start to impact. This is an extraordinary piece.
Marchant Davis puts both a naive appeal and edgy self-delusion into Moses and Anna Kendrick as the young FBI agent brings her angular hardness and intelligence against each other. Both are caught in the same web, apparently by the same forces (you'll have to see it to see why) and a happy ending is not looking likely. For emphasis, end titles telling the characters' fate flash over the closing song. When this was done in American Graffiti it worked as no one expected it in a fiction film but it has become the bane of biopics and satires alike ever since, a kind of slap on the face in case we missed the point (the worst are the ones at the end of the otherwise excellent Nowhere Boy: really, that John Lennon got famous with that band?) But here they give information that lets us mull over what we've just been laughing at and provide the last motion of the gut punch.
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